For those of you who missed it, the Brain Simulation Platform (BSP) Demo(15mins) can be watched here:

In the first 5 minutes, Felix gives an overview what the objectives ofthe Brain Simulation Platform are (what? you mean we can't solveeverything? ). In the 2nd 5 minutes, I give an overview of the BSPapplied to the hippocampus.

If you're interested to take a look around the HBP Collaboratory,please just let me know, and I can invite you, and also add you to theHippocampus Collab. Note, a big issue is still that we're not able togive HPC time away for free to anyone off the street. But for thehippocampus project, there are possibilities to get time on the BBPBG/Q to help us develop, refine, validate and study the model at thisearly draft stage. Please contact me if you're interested.

Also, several have expressed interest in the automated simplificationpipeline, which I'm happy to report is working surprisingly well, onthe example of the BBP somatosensory cortex model! For more details, andnumbers, there is now a pre-print on arXiv:http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00087A quick screencast describing that is here:

This is an important part of our community building strategy, as itallows data-integration to happen iteratively on detailed models on theone hand, from which minimal models for specific hypothesis-drivenstudies can be derived in a automated way, and validated against thedata-driven reference. Effectively, this bridges the contentious issueof what level of detail to choose. Now we can be pluralistic, andpropagate insights back and forth (the simplification is preservingapproximate neuron identity in the circuit! - see the preprint, e.g.figure 9 compared to the same in the Markram et al, 2015).

Also, for those who missed it, BluePyOpt is our new opensource tool foroptimizing neurons. Here's a preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00500A quick screencast describing that is here: